Shoot Him If He Runs

20

Stone drove back to the inn and parked at the cottage, and he saw Holly and Genevieve stretched out on the beach, naked, a very pleasant sight. He liked Holly’s slimmer body. He went inside, undressed, grabbed a towel and joined them.

“Hey, there,” Holly said. “Where you been?”

“I made a stop at the airport, then I went to see my old colleague Sir Leslie Hewitt.”

“And?”

“And I gleaned some useful information. Where’s Dino?”

“He says the sun makes you old; he’s napping inside.”

“Have you spoken with Lance today?”

“Yes; nothing new.”

“You may need to call him again. I began thinking about how Teddy always has an escape route planned, and if he’s on the island how he might need an airplane to get out of here to where there are international connections. So I went out to the airport and had a talk with a fellow named Don Wells, who runs the FBO, and he showed me an old Cessna 140 that belongs to a recent arrival on the island, one who answers to the general description of Teddy Fay.”

“Who is he?”

“He calls himself Robertson, says he’s English, a retiree who was formerly in the computer business.”

Holly sat up. “I like it,” she said.

“And get this: he lives on Black Mountain, at number 56.”

“Irene is number 100, so I guess he’s halfway up?”

Dino came out of the cottage and joined them. “You woke me up,” he said accusingly.

“Sorry about that. It’s good that you’re here, anyway; we have something to talk about.” He brought Dino up to date on Robertson.

“He sounds good to me,” Dino said.

“Yeah, well, we need to have Lance have his London station check him out, and thoroughly. There’s something else, though.”

“What?” Holly asked.

“Leslie has identified who may have bugged our cottage; his name is Colonel Croyden Croft, and he runs a department called Internal Investigations, which is part of the Home Office, but he really works for Sir Winston Sutherland.”

“Why does Sir Leslie think he bugged our cottage?” Holly asked.

“Because that’s what he does. Leslie thinks he might even have bugged all the cottages when they were built, but that doesn’t take any heat off us.”

“Heat?”

“Leslie says that Sir Winston would welcome an opportunity to throw us all in jail for a while, then expel us from the island. Apparently, he holds a grudge against me from our previous courtroom encounters.”

“Well, thanks, Stone,” Dino said, “for pissing off the powers that be. That’s a great help.”

“My point is, we’ve got to be very careful to be no more than tourists while we’re here. And, of course, we have to be very careful what we say inside the cottage.”

“I’m glad we didn’t yank the bugs,” Holly said. “That would have really pissed them off.”

“I think you have to be careful, too, not to be seen using the satellite phone to call Lance. The sight of the thing by someone who reports to Colonel Croft might just give them the excuse they need to bust us.”

“Good point,” Holly said. “I think I’ll go behind the cottage and phone Lance now; I want to get him working on this Robertson guy. If we can identify him as Teddy, then we can get out of here before Sir Winston falls on us.”

“Go ahead.” He handed her a slip of paper. “This is the British registration number of his airplane.”

Holly picked up her towel, wrapped it around her sarong-style and grabbed her handbag. She went into the cottage, then out the back door into a fenced-in area where the gas bottle and the garbage cans were, then she dug the satphone out of her bag and called Lance’s direct line at Langley.

“Lance Cabot.”

“It’s Holly.”

“Your second call today; something new?”

She told him about Robertson and asked for a background check, then explained their situation with Sir Winston.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t get yourselves arrested,” Lance said. “If we had to bring pressure on the St. Marks government to get you out of there, we’d have to involve the State Department, and then questions might arise as to your presence there, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“I understand; we’ll be careful.”

“I don’t want you sniffing around this Robertson while I’m checking him out. It’s already late in London, so it’s going to be tomorrow before anything can be done. I’ll call the duty officer now and leave instructions so that they can get started first thing in the morning, while we’re still sleeping.”

“Great, but don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

“Why?”

“Because of the bugging in the cottage. I don’t want the listeners to hear the satphone ringing or my end of the conversation. What time shall I call you?”

“Around ten o’clock; I’ll know at least something by then. And remember, Holly, the last time Sir Winston got an American woman in his jail, he tried to hang her.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Holly said drily. “Will you call Ham and find out how Daisy is doing?”

“Holly, the Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t do dog checks.”

“Can I call him on the satphone?”

“Oh, all right.”

“Talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up and called her father in Orchid Beach, Florida.

“This is Barker,” he drawled.

“Hey, Ham.”

“Hey, girl; how’s it going?”

“Pretty well, I guess; tell Ginny I’m enjoying being her. I lost fifteen pounds for the job.”

“That couldn’t hurt.”

“Watch it, Ham. How’s Daisy?”

“Happy as a clam; she goes fishing with me every day and helps by lying down on the foredeck and falling asleep.”

“She’s eating well?”

“You ever know her to turn down a meal?”

“Well, you know, I miss her.”

“By the way, somebody was sniffing around the flight school, asking questions about Ginny.”

“Oh, God, I hope Ginny wasn’t there.”

“She was giving a flying lesson at the time. It was a black guy in a suit and tie, with some sort of accent, and being that dressed up is pretty rare around here.”

“Who’d he talk to?”

“The secretary/bookkeeper in the office. She told him Ginny was out of the country on vacation, like she was supposed to.”

“That’s a relief to hear. We found out our cottage was bugged, and it’s interesting to know that somebody’s checking on us.”

“Well, you watch your ass, girl; I don’t want to have to come down there and bring your corpse home.”

“Relax, Ham; nothing like that going on. I gotta go. You give Daisy a big, wet kiss for me.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll give Ginny one, instead.”

“Bye.” She hung up and went back out to the beach.

“What’s the word?”

“I’ll call Lance tomorrow at ten for the results of the background check. There’s something else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“A black man in a suit with an accent visited Ginny’s flying school and asked questions about her.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Fortunately, he didn’t see Ginny; she was flying. And the lady in the office gave him the ready story. I hope that satisfied him.”

“So do I,” Stone said. “I hope that’s an end to it.”